Letter: Support bill prohibiting intense confinement for hens

Posted 5/15/17

To the editor:

In March, I attended a hearing for House Bill H-6023, which would prohibit the intensive confinement of pregnant sows, veal calves and egg-laying hens, as well as the sale of …

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Letter: Support bill prohibiting intense confinement for hens

Posted

To the editor:

In March, I attended a hearing for House Bill H-6023, which would prohibit the intensive confinement of pregnant sows, veal calves and egg-laying hens, as well as the sale of products produced by animals kept in such confinement. 

This might not seem relevant to most Rhode Islanders, since Rhode Island is not a large pork, veal and egg producer, but it is very relevant to the 40,000 hens suffering in intensive confinement at little Rhody Egg Farm, a windowless battery cage facility tucked neatly out of our sight and minds in rural Foster. 

Stacked several tiers high, the five to eight chickens crowded in battery cages at Little Rhody are each afforded an area of personal space roughly equal to the dimensions of a piece of notebook paper. They can barely move. They can’t spread their wings. They can’t get away from the other chickens vying for space. In human terms, living in a battery cage is comparable to spending the duration of your life in an elevator with seven other people. 

At the hearing, opponents to H-6023 claimed that hens are safer and healthier in battery cages than hens granted free range, but they failed to mention that caged hens often suffer bone fractures from the immobility and calcium depletion related to intensive egg production. 

They say that unhappy hens don’t produce eggs, as if an animal’s reproductive cycle is directly related to its emotional state. Clinically depressed women still ovulate. Why wouldn’t abused chickens? They state that battery cages protect chickens from their own cannibalistic instincts by preventing a pecking order, without mentioning that battery-caged hens are typically debeaked without anesthesia at the hatchery in order to reduce “non-nutritive” pecking, and that the weaker birds are trampled by the stronger hens who desperately crave something to stand on other than wire mesh. 

They don’t tell us that the hens in their care are all destined for early retirement via the slaughterhouse as soon as their production levels drop, which is usually at about 2 years of age, after having been subjected to a forced molt through food deprivation in order to shock their systems into a second cycle of egg production. The natural lifespan of a free ranging chicken is 5 to 8 years.

And finally, they claim that the price of their affordable eggs will skyrocket, even though this has not been the case in trailblazing states like California, which passed a ballot measure in 2008 to phase out battery cages. 

H-6023 is a modest bill seeking only to grant confined animals enough room to stand up, lie down, turn around and spread their limbs fully. The bill does not compensate for the deprivation of sunshine, fresh earth and the freedom to exercise their natural instincts that Little Rhody hens suffer for their entire, brief lives. Intensive confinement of farmed animals will one day be regarded as barbaric. Urge your legislators to support H-6023 and hold Rhode Island’s agricultural industry to a higher standard. 

Christa Albrecht-Vegas

259 Sprague St.

Portsmouth

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